


Anything But Black

by hafren



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-26
Updated: 2009-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-03 18:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Gauda Prime, our heroes go shopping...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything But Black

He was repairing a communicator when Blake came and sat on his desk.

"Leave that now. Time to go shopping."

"What, this minute?"

"You need clothes, don't you? You can't keep borrowing things."

"I wouldn't have to, if you'd give me mine back."

Blake's face shut like a blind coming down. Avon got up and followed him. He wasn't sure, these days, how much argument Blake would tolerate. As they went out to the flyer, he noticed that Blake was carrying a rucksack.

"What's that for?"

"It'll come in handy for the shopping." This might have been true, if it were empty, but it wasn't. Avon didn't ask what was in it. If Blake wanted him to know, he would presumably tell him.

"You know, I'm perfectly capable of going there and buying clothes on my own. You could stay here. It'd be safer."

"What, and let you choose stuff? No chance." Blake whistled a tune as he started up the controls.

"Am I to understand," Avon said carefully, "that _you_ are proposing to choose it?"

"That's right."

Avon leaned back and thought about it. In his mind the urge to say "not in a million years" vied with a huge sense of obligation, and the fact that Blake was smiling and looking unaccountably light-hearted. He told himself that it was the first thing Blake had asked of him since.... and ignored, for the moment, the fact that it had hardly been a request. He was quiet throughout the journey, thinking, watching Blake and listening to him singing under his breath. Anyway, he thought, it would be good to be properly dressed again. He shifted uncomfortably; though what he had on fitted him well enough, he didn't feel right in it. Everything was too thin, too insubstantial; he felt the cold.

They parked the flyer on the roof of the superstore and took the lift down. Emerging in the menswear department, Blake looked around and announced superfluously "Trousers".

Avon glanced at the serried ranks of trousers surrounding them. "You don't say?" Blake found a shopping cart and started examining the racks.

Avon, noting with regret the total absence of leather, picked out a pair and tossed them into the cart. "They'll do."

"No. Put them back."

"Why?"

"Wrong colour."

"They're black. I like black."

"_Put them back_" Blake spoke very quietly. Avon looked at him a moment and complied.

Blake, composure regained, hauled out trousers and dropped them in the cart. Avon let the fawn ones pass without comment, and the rich brown, but when Blake added a pair which by the most charitable estimate were violet, he protested "Blake, no!" Blake smiled serenely and draped some dusky-pink ones on top of the heap. He charged off, Avon trailing in his wake, and called over his shoulder "Come on. Shirts next."

They were beautiful too, silk and expensive, but Avon noted with alarm that Blake still seemed to be fixated on pastels. When lavender, shell-pink and the palest sea-green had augmented the rainbow in the cart, Avon suggested tentatively "How about plain white?"

"Good idea." Blake lifted one out. It was white all right, but describing its flowing sleeves and silver embroidery as plain was stretching language a bit. Avon sighed, but Blake was already engrossed with jackets. At least he now seemed to have sated his pastel craze; he chose deep, glowing wine-red and midnight blue. "Velvet's hellish impractical, you know," Avon remarked. Blake didn't seem to be listening.

Avon thought _I am going to look ridiculous in all this_ and then _If that is all the revenge he wants, I should think myself lucky_. A jacket at the end of a rail caught his eye. He stroked the material; it was heavy and textured like brocade, but without the stiffness. There were patterns in the texture, but you felt rather than saw them, because it was black on black. He slipped it on and turned round.

Blake was standing very still, eyes fixed on him. As if he couldn't move. As if he'd been _told_ not to move. Avon cursed himself silently and took the thing off.

It honestly hadn't occurred to him before why Blake might want to see him in anything but black. He thought about apologising, couldn't find the right words and settled for not arguing when Blake, at the next counter, amassed a selection of socks and underwear in translucent shades that were more like evanescent radiances than colours.

Avon surveyed the dazzling cart and regretted not bringing dark glasses. "Is that it, then? Can we just go and buy the stuff?"

"Not quite." Blake gestured at the changing rooms. With some difficulty, and help from an eager assistant who saw himself buying a small planet with the day's commission, they got the thing into one of the cubicles, and Blake locked the door. He sat down on the one chair, dumping the rucksack beside him, and gestured at Avon's borrowed clothes. "Off."

Avon still wasn't sure what this was about, and Blake's face gave no clue. Was it a resurgence of the desire he had shown no sign of since....? Or, more likely, a display of power, by way of revenge? Avon decided it would be presumptuous to assume anything else, so he did not turn it into a strip show. He undressed silently and compliantly, feeling the deep blush that spread over his face before he saw it in the mirrored wall.

Naked, he kept his eyes on the floor, knowing he was being surveyed. Blake's toe kicked the rucksack across to him. "Put those on." Avon opened it and lifted out, with some difficulty, the bundle of heavy clothes inside.

It was what he'd been wearing on Gauda Prime. Avon stifled a gasp as he saw the familiar coat, cleaned and mended if somewhat rumpled from its time in the rucksack. He looked with concern at Blake; why would the man want to do this to himself?

"Put them on. But don't look in the mirror."

Avon complied. Black briefs and socks. Thin black top. Black leather trousers. He must have lost weight during his illness; he had to use a new belt-hole. The heavy coat with its white studded embellishments. And the even more heavily-armoured sleeveless jacket on top. The boots, last of all. He'd forgotten what a weight it all was.

Blake rose and walked over to him, with what was clearly a great effort of will, his face white and strained. Standing behind him, he took Avon's shoulders and turned him towards the mirror. "Look now." His voice was throaty.

Avon looked. Saw his own face, as pale as Blake's, above its carapace of black. Saw himself armoured, hidden, untouchable, invulnerable. Suddenly it didn't seem easy to breathe in the stifling weight of leather; he couldn't think how he had ever borne it. He could feel himself shivering, panicking slightly. Blake's face, over his shoulder, was very still, and Avon thought _This is what he saw on Gauda_. For a moment he thought he would retch.

"It looked worse with the gun," said Blake, reading his eyes right this time. He came around in front and held Avon to him briefly until the shivering stopped. Then he knelt. "Lift your foot".

He took one of Avon's boots off, then the other, and tossed them into a corner. Then he rose and slipped off the sleeveless jacket. Avon breathed out. Blake undid the heavy coat and Avon nearly sobbed with relief as it slid off his shoulders. Then his belt was undone; the trousers, loose about his waist, fell almost unaided and he kicked his way clear of them.

Blake was working on the thin shirt. He had big fingers, not ideal for small buttons, and he had to ease each one open slowly, sliding his hands under the fabric, while Avon felt the warm fingertips brush against his chest and nearly screamed with frustration. He still didn't know if this was meant to be erotic, but it bloody was, now. He could not repress the odd inarticulate little sound, and stopped trying to when he realised that Blake rather liked it. At least, every time it happened, he seemed to get stroked a bit more.

By the time Blake eased the briefs off him, he was desperate for contact, reaching out for him. Blake stood up and held him by the shoulders, at arms' length, but there was a warmth in his eyes that hadn't been there before. He pointed to the heap of black in the corner.

"Do you still want them back?" he asked quietly. Avon shuddered and shook his head. He didn't even want to look at them.

"Right, then," Blake said happily and went rummaging in the cart. He came up with a pair of briefs in an impossible, iridescent shade that looked like nothing so much as mother-of-pearl executed in silk. Avon made to take them, but Blake forestalled him. "No. I'm doing this."

Being dressed again was not precisely what Avon's body wanted, but his mind could see that it mattered to Blake, so he went along with it. The briefs and socks that whispered against his skin, the violet trousers, the soft ivory shirt with its billowing sleeves and glinting embroidery, the jacket whose blue was so deep, he half expected to see stars in it. When Blake turned him to the mirror again, he saw a stranger whose outlines shimmered and blurred, who had no armour, who looked open to every chance.

The warm voice behind him asked, "How's that?"

"Different."

"Is that good?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, then," Blake leaned back in the chair, "you'd better get them off, so we can go and buy them." He eyed Avon with an appreciative glint that left no doubt, this time, of his intentions.

Avon smiled, half-turned and began, very, very slowly, to slip the jacket off his shoulders.


End file.
